Ok let me share some thoughts, first DYOR, this involves of course asking lots of questions like you are doing here.

Most the mining scene takes place in Telegram groups, to some extent Twitter and in some cases Discord. You need to get in those groups and use the search box.

Something you may already know is that while Bitcoin is all about verifying and not trusting, BUT pools on the other hand are not in the verifying side of the equation. You need to trust their algos for scoring, trust the payouts will come along, trust they won't rampup their fees, trust the hashrate the pool shows is real and its not being faked (your share depends on the denominator size), trust them to pay with new coin, ,... and so on.

You need to be familiar with the concept of difficulty for scoring, this is because the pool verifies you are actually doing the POW of processing for the pool, every couple seconds your miner will produce a share based on a difficulty target that the pool will double check re-doing the same hash, by now you should realize that miners ar not uploading every single hash to the pool.

You need to be absolutely clear on the revenue distribution method: PPS, FPPS, PPLNS, PPS+ and whatever variation or combination. If you trust the pool you will come to the conclusion that PPLNS is the best method, but there is a catch. If you are not online mining when the block is found.. you missed it.

PPLNS is all about pool size and how pron to downtime your mining operation is or how happy poolswap trigger you are. Smaller pools need hours or even days until a block is discovered, so if this is the case and you decided to turn off ur miner or swap just before a block is found.. all the previous hashrate goes for nothing. PPLNS is about assuming the pool risk in the hopes of better rewards and lower fees.

Not all pools are easy to get in and accepted.

At some point you can also solo mine, odds at least seem better than a lottery ticket if you throw in some petahashes from now and then.